I rarely sell stuff on eBay, but have recently got rid of a couple of items that were gathering dust in the loft. One of these was an old graphics card.
On Tuesday my pc appeared to have picked up a couple of viruses – immediately flagged up by windows defender. I then installed a couple of free anti virus programs and ran full scan a few times to make sure there was nothing else on there.
Several hours later someone used my account to list a £700 graphics card, it sold immediately being well underpriced but as I was online at the time I was able to cancel the sale and get into my account and change my password.
So what’s the likely explanation? Have they been able to steal my password using whatever virus was on my PC? Nothing else seems to have been compromised and I’ve been in and changed any important passwords, I’ll also be reformatting it before I use it for anything like banking etc. It just seems odd that they hadn’t immediately changed my eBay password and locked me out. And how would this even work as a scam, if the buyer had paid the cash would have just came to me wouldn’t it? I’ve also checked my login history on eBay and there’s nothing odd there either with all recent activity coming from what looks like my own location.

The malware, or the free antivirus you used may be at fault.

More likely, you’ve clicked a link in an email pretending to be from eBay and inadvertently logged in to a fake site, I reckon this is how most people get hacked. Or an email from PayPal or another site where you use the same password.

This is the reason you should use different passwords for every site (even if it’s just a few letters added to your usual password) and why online banking generally uses pin numbers and memorable words to prevent you from using your usual password.

You should change your email password too and turn on two factor authentication wherever it’s offered (I think eBay has this now)